I'm trying to get my Kindle book set up on CreateSpace. I have the inside done. After five hours today I have the entire cover/back/spine done. Now that I'm turning it into a PDF the file is over 63 mb and it won't let me upload unless it is 40 mb and below. How on earth am I supposed to reduce it by that? I'm using their template, it's at 300 dpi. The back, cover and spine were all done in Photoshop. once finished I flattened, saved as JPG at the highest quality. I then chose to embed the files one at a time, bringing it into the template PSD, sizing it correctly, etc. Once done, I flattened that document then went to Save As and chose PDF, went through all of those settings, etc. So what am I missing? Because after over 6 hours of this today I am about ready to throw something through a window. Help please!!!
There's definitely something wrong: my cover PDFs are typically around 10MB. I enable compression when creating the PDF, maybe that's the difference: does Photoshop have an option to do that?
I looked and the template they had me download is that big. Do you download your templates? Or what do you do?
Oh, did you crop around the image after you finished it? I download the template and crop around the pink area to remove all the excess white, so the final image is much smaller than the template. Looks like the last short story cover I uploaded was 3107x2478 (with a very narrow spine). The raw template is 5700x3900, so much larger.
Ohhh! I figured that the template meant I had to keep that white space. But if I crop around the pink it works out okay? Going to go and try that! Thank you!
Okay I cropped around the pink/bleed zone and it is now 22.7 mb. So I'm assuming that this is okay. I guess I'll try uploading it and see if they scream at me for cropping the white away LOL
And is this for print or for Kindle? I'm trying to do this for printing. Maybe that's why it's twice the size?
That's for Createspace. For Kindle I use the standard size, which is something like 1536x2500 (though I think they may be asking for a larger size now).
It's uploading! Thank you so much, you saved my sanity! I looked at your covers on Amazon and they look fantastic - very nicely done!
A bit late here, BUT I ran into the same problem and realized where the problem lay. As I suppose many do, I started putting it together on Photoshop. As is my wont, I experimented with a lot of different pictures, fonts, and so on. Now... when one saves a Photoshop file as a PDF, it saves ALL that stuff, NOT just what is visible. The first thing to do is back up what you have, then DELETE ALL LAYERS YOU ARE NOT USING. If that doesn't do it, though it should, FLATTEN the image and save it. If that doesn't work... God hates you and wants you to do something else with your life.
Thanks for the suggestions, aClem! I had actually done all those and the only way I could get the size small enough was to crop all that extra white space out. It does sound like a lot of people find it difficult.
I'm not sure why you're trying to send them a .psd. Go to file and choose "Save for web and devices..." You'll get a nice little window and you can save it as a .PNG .jpg or .gif. Obviously here you want the .PNG, it's lossless and has an alpha channel. But you can set the resolution and compression to anything you feel like. It'll be much smaller then a .psd and if they're using any image program at all, they'll be able to read a .PNG.
Good advice but I think (going back in my memory here) that cover files can be .jpg or .gif or .whatever for the kindle version but they have to be .pdf for createspace. And the contents (text), have to be .pdf or .pub for createspace
Oh, then it's easy. Export a .PNG, open it in Photoshop, and save it as a .pdf. No loosing any data from flattening the image, no problems. You should be saving iterently in any case, but I understand most people can't keep 30 copies of a 60MB file.
Or in my case (before I got photoshop, when I used to use a very good, easy to use image program (I hate photoshop with a passion)) find an online converter that will convert your files for free!
I have a tech savvy friend who tells me which sites are the safest to use. But I also now have photoshop (;kaihgkjagkjnbkzjkjhfj) and Foxit PDF editor.
Yes, CreateSpace moved the goal on us. Used to be a .jpg would suffice but they now require a .pdf that fits their template. I struggled with it for a bit but once I got it right, I am no longer having problems.
Then I'd like to restate my solution: .PNG is adobe's latent file format, that they somehow got web standards to support. I normally use .tifs but the saving process is a pain in the ass next to the "save for web" system. Now I've been saving all my render files as .PNGs because it's so much easier.
Yes, that will work very nicely. I can only hope that I have something to put a cover on at some point in the foreseeable future.
I am going to have soooo many problems with my next cover. It's a variation of the first one but the first one was done in MS Digital Imaging, which doesn't exist anymore. Lord knows how the hell I'm going to do it (even though I still have all the original art) because I have no understanding of photoshop whatsoever! It's worse than a foreign language to me, it's an alien language to me!
LOL!!! On the face of it, it's dead, dead simple. Add photoshop to the mix and OMG! But I certainly will message you.
